The Jammu and Kashmir Apni Party (JKAP) on Tuesday sought the Centre’s intervention to end “groupism” in the J&K administration between those loyal to the Raj Bhavan and others allied with the Chief Secretary’s office and alleged that Kashmiri officers were being sidelined systematically.
“The governance in J&K has come to a grinding halt mainly because of sharp groupism in bureaucracy, which seems to be busy in proving loyalties towards their respective centres of influence,” asserted JKAP leader Rafi Ahmad Mir. “Some officers show inclination towards the Raj Bhavan and are unfortunately at loggerheads with their bureaucrat colleagues who toe the line of the highest office in the civil secretariat,” he added.
He alleged that J&K was witnessing “uncertainty and an unwanted decay in its governance apparatus mainly because of the lobbyism”.
“The management of the COVID pandemic across Kashmir has been handed over to some officers who are completely inaccessible to people. This is because these officers think they are unaccountable because of their close proximity with the power corridors,” Mr. Mir added.
The JKAP leader said that many important projects had been stuck due to the intransigence of some officers. “The J&K government is sidelining the officers of a particular region on the basis of their region and religion. The J&K government was supposed to follow egalitarian ideology of welfare for the common man and its policies were not supposed to be bound by regional, religious and caste-based equations,” he added.
He said there was a wide gulf between the administration and the people. “Officers from Kashmir regions have either been assigned to insignificant postings or have been dumped completely. Now one needs a magnifying glass to see if at all a Kashmiri officer is at the helm anywhere in some sensitive places of posting. This trend is dangerous and needs to be reversed in the interest of pluralistic and secular spirit of our constitution,” he added.
The recently floated JKAP shot into the limelight when its top leaders, including president Altaf Bukhari, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi in March to discuss issues pertaining to J&K.
